Endorsement or sponsorship deals with various entities (e.g., athletes, celebrities, politicians, teams, other brands, leagues, etc.) are powerful marketing tools utilized by many brands. It is difficult, however, to quantify the potential efficacy of a marketing association (e.g., endorsement or sponsorship, etc.) with an entity with any degree of certainty. These problems are due in no small part to the fact that any assessment of the visibility, popularity or presence of a potential endorser or sponsor lacks any sort of insight into the reasons behind that status. The visibility could be due to a variety of causes and be due to notoriety or popularity, one of which may be potentially valuable while the other may be anathema to a brand who desires a certain image. Of course, in some circumstances that same notoriety could also be highly desirable for certain brands. As can be seen then, evaluating the potential efficacy of an entity in a marketing role may be difficult.
Such an evaluation may be further complicated by a brand's desire to determine the value of an entity within certain spheres of influence occupied by that entity, namely within a particular domain occupied by that entity. Thus, while it may be useful to attempt an evaluation of an entity's overall efficacy as a marketer, it may also be useful to know an entity's efficacy as a marketer within his or her own specific domain. For example, a brand may desire to determine a baseball player's marketability specifically within the domain of baseball. Part and parcel with this evaluation, then, is a brand's desire to evaluate entities relative to one another and relative to one another within a domain such that entities can effectively be compared with one another to arrive at marketing decisions for a brand. So, to continue with the above example, a brand may desire to know how a particular baseball player compares to other baseball players as relates to marketability.
Complicating the process of these types of marketability evaluations is the fact that, in recent years, insights from online presence, social media and social media conversations are changing the way brands make marketing decisions. Currently, online and social media exposure of entities may be significant criteria in marketing decisions made by brands with respect to endorsement or sponsorship deals with those entities. The assessment of an entity's online and social media exposures is, however, fraught with the same difficulty as the general assessment of the visibility, popularity or presence of an entity. While many social media sites provide some proprietary metrics for exposure generally, it is again difficult to suss out the reasons behind an entity's online and social media exposure. Like exposure generally, not all online or social media exposure is good exposure where most brands are concerned.
Moreover, the ever increasing prevalence of online outlets and social media sites has made an assessment of social media exposure of an entity difficult as well. The sheer number of social media sites across which an entity may have a presence, each of which may expose an entity in a different manner and which provides different methods of interaction and different data models makes the collection and evaluation of such data extremely difficult. Additionally, an entity's social media exposure may not be limited to just that entity's account with a particular social media site, as other users may link to, or otherwise, associate with or promulgate content associated with an entity.
It would thus be desirable to be able to interface with, and obtain data from, disparate online and social media sites despite the varied interfaces and data models used by those sites, amalgamate data on an entity's online and social media presence from these disparate online and social media sites and be able to evaluate that data to assess the online and social media exposure by quantifying facets of an entity's online and social media exposure in a domain specific manner that facilitates comparison between such entities.